A Duke's Temptation

by Hunter, Jillian

  He had just gotten around to reading his most recent letter from his publisher. Philbert inquired about his health. God forbid Samuel should drop dead before he finished this book. Philbert also alluded to the latest critiques from Paris that showered praise on the Brothers Grimm. He then coyly apologized for an editorial in the London Review that blamed a rise in promiscuity on rogue writers such as Lord Anonymous.

  Who, the editor added, wrote with the unbridled passion of a nasty-spirited spinster.

  It was unlike Philbert to resort to a tactic like this. In fact, Samuel would have shredded the letter except for the tantalizing postscript Philbert added that said an offer had been made for a libretto on the next book.

  He placed the letter in a drawer. He got up. He started to pace.

  Within moments words flooded his brain. Fast. Too fast. He rushed back to his desk. He found his favorite metallic pen. It was a race to capture his thoughts before they vanished.

  Images formed.

  Wickbury spoke in a furious voice. But all of a sudden, the heroic earl wasn’t talking for the benefit of his readers. He was addressing Samuel, character to creator, trying to make sense of the chaos into which he had been thrust. “How did this happen to me again? I demand another chance to fight for Juliette. I will be damned if an entire army could lock me in another cell with my lady left defenseless in my enemy’s arms.”

  Fine, Samuel thought. Then fight the battle yourself, you ludicrous jackanapes.

  “Perhaps I will.”

  Samuel shook his head. He must be going mad.

  He glanced at the longcase clock that stood between a pair of wing chairs. Five minutes left.

  Five minutes until he could search the house for Lily, the lady he had abandoned like one of his characters.

  His future duchess.

  His disgraced bride.

  She would not regret binding herself to Samuel, and hang the bastard who had not only lost but ruined her. Samuel would make her forget she had ever known her captain. As soon as he finished the book that was suspended over his head like the sword of Damocles.

  As a gentleman Samuel had to wonder why Captain Grace had not defended her and admitted what he had done. No decent man would subject the woman he loved to humiliation to save his own selfish arse.

  As a scoundrel, however, Samuel sensed that the captain’s connection to her had not been completely broken.

  He could not understand how Grace had let her go.

  There was something in the story that did not make sense. Motivation. Out of character. More than a plot thread dangling loose. An entire scene omitted. Another’s perspective. The longer Samuel thought about it, the deeper his concern grew. He couldn’t put his finger on it.

  But the answer would come. It always did.

  Lily found a message from Samuel under her door after she had gone upstairs to change her dress. He asked her if she would tour St. Aldwyn with him after he had completed his day’s work. So she had wandered about the estate until supper, instructing the gardeners which roses and sprays of Queen Anne’s lace should be clipped for His Grace’s dinner table. Pyramus and Thisbe, the porkers that Samuel kept as pets, deigned to trot about at her heels while she walked the paths around the barns and other outbuildings. The two pigs sniffed her stockings and looked up at her as if to ask if they were going on an adventure.

  Hens, turkeys, ducks. None of them destined for dinner. Lily shook her head. Samuel seemed to think he could protect all of creation. Well, she had been a goose once herself. She came to a fenced pasture and gazed over the gate to approach the moor pony inside.

  “That’s Bucephalus, miss,” shouted Marie-Elaine’s young daughter, sitting with an under groom in the straw-filled cart.

  “Bucephalus,” Lily said, laughing at the long-fringed pony munching at a patch of clover. “So this is Lord Wickbury’s charger, the brave steed that will allow no other rider near him.”

  A deep voice spoke over her shoulder. “Hard to believe he’s charged through execution blocks and castle gates.”

  She spun around, forcing herself to curtsy, if only to catch her breath. The stark emotion in Samuel’s eyes pierced her composure. He didn’t have to say a word to remind her of what he had done to her last night, and that he wanted her again. She would not be hard to persuade. He was temptation incarnate in an ebony-buttoned long frock coat over a cravat, linen shirt, and ecru breeches that tied at the knee.

  “How are you, Lily?” he asked quietly.

  She swallowed at his intimate smile. Sometimes he looked completely wicked. At others, he seemed winsome and lost. “I am well,” she said. “And Your Grace’s day—”

  “—was an absolute waste of time. I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” He braced his wrists on either side of the fence rail, his cravat teasing the soft valley of her breasts. “Will you accept my formal proposal?”

  Her heart pounded in the hollow of her throat. “I wasn’t sure that you were serious. Women are warned not to believe promises made in the dark.”

  He looked offended. “Do you think I would lie to lure you into my bed?”

  “Well, I was already in your bed. And you do like to tell tales.”

  “That isn’t fair. I could not explain everything until I knew I could trust you. If I hadn’t been trying to behave properly for once in my life, you would have come home with me in London and that would have been it. My fault, it seems, was trying to initiate a correct courtship.”

  “By kissing me until I nearly fainted in Philbert’s garden?” she teased him.

  “Lily, I couldn’t help myself then. And I can’t now. In most aspects of my life, I show strong self-discipline.”

  “But who are you? A duke with a vile reputation or Lord Anonymous? Which one of you did I give myself to last evening?”

  “I was hoping you could answer that for me. I’m both. And neither.”

  He was a wit, a compassionate man, uninhibited in bed. Generous. Arrogant. Beautifully formed.

  He touched her shoulder. A shiver danced over her skin. His hand slid down her back. Then he bent his head and kissed her, clearly not caring who could see. She backed up against the pasture gate in breathless surprise, whispering, “The other servants are watching!”

  “I suppose they shall have to get used to it. You’re going to be my duchess, not one of the plaster goddesses standing in the hall. You have accepted my proposal?”

  “There was never any doubt in your mind. I began to fall in love with you at the masquerade. Yes, of course I accept.”

  He smiled down at her. “I loved you before I knew your name.”

  “And I love . . . all your names.”

  He laughed. “Then it is perfect.”

  “I should be in the kitchen now,” she whispered. “It’s getting late.”

  “Don’t bother with a big dinner. I’ll be asking the staff for help during the evening. If you have a stout heart for fighting and a sense of stage direction, please join us. If not, lock yourself in your room and put a pillow over your head.”

  Chapter 31

  “Lock myself in my room with a pillow over my head,” she related to Marie-Elaine and Mrs. Halford in the kitchen fifteen minutes later. “Did he ever give either of you that advice?”

  Mrs. Halford lowered her knife and began chopping up fresh mint to go in a bottle of sugared vinegar for sauce. “I can’t admit that he did.”

  “He didn’t,” Marie-Elaine said from the dresser. “But I wouldn’t have done it anyway. Helping the duke rehearse is better than playing whist with Bickerstaff.”

  “I heard that, Mrs. Halford,” he said from the pantry. “I shall remember it, too, during dinner, if you ever get around to feeding us.”

  “You didn’t hear properly, you mean old codger,” Mrs. Halford said, knife flying faster. “That wasn’t me talking. It was Marie-Elaine.”

  “Peace,” Lily said, raising her hand. “Behave, the pair of you.”

  The duke had request
ed only salad and a boiled potato in mint sauce for his dinner, with strawberries in champagne cream for dessert. He asked that the food be left on a tray outside his office. Lily didn’t see him again until it was time for bed.

  She followed the nightly ritual that the other servants did, extinguishing all candles and coals, putting the animals outside for the night, closing drapes. By the time she finished her duties a hush had crept over St. Aldywn House. The rest of the house might have vanished into the walls.

  Why should she lock herself in her room?

  She wondered if everyone was playing a trick on her. She’d been initiated only last night, so it was possible that they would test her nerves by pulling a few pranks. She wandered about checking for hidden doors, but after an hour of hunting, she decided that if they meant to exclude her, then she’d go to bed.

  Her bedroom.

  She heard furtive whispers, glasses clinking, steel engaging steel, and Samuel’s voice, husky and impatient. “Are you positive she’ll figure out where we are?”

  “She reads your books, Your Grace,” Mrs. Halford said in a low voice. “She’ll find us out.”

  “Especially if you give us away,” Bickerstaff retorted, apparently still stung by their earlier quarrel.

  Lily halted outside her door. Would this evening prove as interesting as the last? She braced herself, prepared for anything.

  She turned the doorknob and entered her sitting room. Dark except for the rectangle of light that shone under her bedroom door.

  She detected the rustling of papers and several soft, quiet footsteps. She wet her bottom lip. The rapscallions were lying in wait. Should she act surprised, dismayed, or—

  She opened the second door and stared, laughter slowly escaping her as she recognized the assembly of scoundrels who gathered in the candlelight. “You . . . you . . .”

  Marie-Elaine stood, shoulder propped to the wall, in a black periwig and the brocade costume of a page as she read a narrative to her small audience. “ ‘So, here, ladies and gentlemen, is our hero, Michael Francis, Lord Wickbury, heir to the earldom of Wickbury, which has been confiscated by Cromwell’s forces. The old earl and his gentle wife, Lord Michael’s parents, are thought to have been drowned at sea by his evil, eeevil half brother, Sir Renwick Hexworthy, who worships the darkness and covets everything Michael protects, including his magnificent horse Bucephalus and the lady who behaves like a lowborn tavern wench—’ ”

  “Enough!” Samuel exclaimed, striding across the room.

  Except that Samuel wasn’t Samuel at all. He was the Earl of Wickbury from the gallery balcony—hero in a half-unbuttoned linen shirt, crimson satin doublet, and a pair of straight breeches that dropped into the cuffs of his leather riding boots. On his left sleeve hung a curl of hair wrapped in thick black ribbon.

  Lily’s eyes traveled up his bare throat to the white-plumed cavalier’s hat that overshadowed his face. She had always wondered how Lord Wickbury kept it on during his adventures. But Samuel wore the dashing costume well . . . so well, in fact, that it took Marie-Elaine’s discreet cough to terminate her musings.

  “May I continue?” the maid asked, her eyes bright with mischief.

  Samuel looked at Lily. “If Miss Boscastle doesn’t mind.”

  Lily nodded. “By all means.”

  “ ‘As our story concludes, again,’” Marie-Elaine continued, “ ‘in the castle of that villainous wizard Sir Renwick Hexworthy,’ who as I have stated happens to be Lord Wickbury’s half brother, although his origins have never been logically explained—”

  “No more editorials, please,” the duke snapped, sliding his sword back into its sheath.

  Lily seated herself on the stool, startled to notice Bickerstaff behind the dressing screen in a Roundhead’s tunic. Two similarly garbed figures peered out at her from behind the cheval glass. Emmett and Ernest? And the woman in a tavern wench’s smock posed awkwardly on Lily’s bed? That couldn’t be Mrs. Halford playing Juliette’s part? She shook her head, so intrigued she almost missed the conclusion of Marie-Elaine’s narration.

  “ ‘—and even though Lord Wickbury realizes he has been led into another ruse, he is willing to sacrifice himself to save Lady Juliette’s life.’ ” She paused. “As well as her alleged virtue.”

  The duke gave her a dark look. “I would prefer you read from the manuscript verbatim. I have never made any such reference.”

  “But one does get that impression,” Lily murmured bravely.

  Samuel turned to regard her in the silence that followed her observation. She forced herself to meet his stare. She had been a Wickbury reader before she became his lover. What was the point in all this melodrama if she couldn’t voice an honest opinion? Was she supposed to sit back and merely admire?

  At length Samuel ended the silence. If she had offended his artistic temperament, he was not going to comment on it. “We will answer the question of Lady Juliette’s virtue, or lack thereof, in a forthcoming chapter.”

  Lily folded her hands in her lap, listening intently.

  He said, “The problem that I, or Wickbury, rather, has is how to fight nine soldiers on a castle parapet.”

  “He always wins his swordfights,” Lily said.

  “I have written this scene a dozen times,” Samuel informed her, “and Wickbury always ends up grievously injured or left to molder in the dungeon.”

  Marie-Elaine cleared her throat. “Or in the tavern wine cellar, depending on the author’s whims.”

  “Didn’t another prisoner help him escape in the last book?” Lily inquired with a thoughtful frown.

  He smiled tersely. “This is different. Lord Wickbury is willing to give up everything for love. And so is Juliette. He might be ready to hang up his sword and settle down, even if that is the death of him.”

  The master and staff of St. Aldwyn House replayed the vigorous episode for five nights in a row and the duke was still displeased. He swore inside and out that with each reenactment he had made drastic changes to the manuscript. From the little Lily was allowed to read, it seemed as if he’d altered only a word or two.

  At some point Bickerstaff suggested a swordfight to rouse the reader from whatever stuporous effect Samuel’s tendency to wax poetic had induced. But Samuel complained that if he heeded this advice, he would either not have a living character left at the end of the book, or the survivors would all be maimed and moaning their soliloquies.

  Strangely enough, though, Lily began to perceive holes in his tightly woven prose that had previously escaped her in the excitement of How Will Lord Wickbury Conquer This Obstacle? Or perhaps she would never be able to read his writing with an objective eye again.

  But on the sixth night, he read Lily a page that riveted her to her chair.

  “ ‘At the last moment an unseen force intervened and prevented Renwick from violating the woman in his bed. There was another spirit in the room. There was a power that reached beneath his spine and . . .’”

  Samuel paused. His voice resonated in the silence.

  “Well, don’t quit now, for heaven’s sake,” Lily said in distress. “My fingers and toes have gone numb from the suspense. What power could stop Renwick’s self-destruction? He has forsaken God. The devil has already taken him to hell and back a hundred times.”

  “Do you want to know?” Samuel sounded so matter-of-fact that Lily could have wrung his neck. “What I mean is—do I have the reader’s attention? Would you put down the book at this point to take a nap or make a pot of tea?”

  “What force is in the room?” she asked through her teeth.

  “His sister,” he said. “She has clawed herself from the grave for revenge.”

  Lily shivered. “What a twisted mind you have.”

  “Do you object?”

  “Object? Unless it involves blood, I cannot wait for more.”

  Indeed, who would have imagined that Miss Lily Boscastle would engage Lord Wickbury in a fencing match? That he would chase her up his winding stair
case at sword point? And that she would step into Sir Renwick’s buckled shoes and fend off his advances with a magic wand? The rapt servants in the hall below became Cromwell’s soldiers.

  Zounds! Ye Gods!

  As to be expected, Lily never won these duels. Samuel inevitably danced her up into the dark gallery with his foil and demanded that she disarm. A month ago she would not have had the stamina to keep up with him. Housekeeping, among other things, had strengthened her arm, although she doubted she would ever be the sword master that he was.

  “Six nights,” she said in protest, dropping the long hazel wand on the gallery carpet. “I understand that you are devoted to your craft, but this is carrying authenticity too far.”

  A slow smile spread across his face. “Do you fault me for trying to weave a few threads of truth into these stories?”

  “The truth,” she said, finally catching her breath, “is that you are an unabashed blackguard taking advantage of his housekeeper in an open gallery.”

  He glanced down at the small group assembled at the foot of the stairs. “I’ll remind you that for the purpose of the plot, this is not a gallery, but a parapet.”

  “A parapet! Then perhaps that is the very problem. Have you ever considered acting this chapter out on a genuine castle walkway?”

  His mouth firmed. “I do not have a castle at my convenience.”

  “Yes, you do. We passed it on the day you brought me here. You told me that you were the owner, in fact, unless that was another one of your stories.”

  He drew away, his expression strained. “It wasn’t. But the interior was destroyed by a fire two decades ago that took my entire family, except for Alice and me. I’m not sure how safe it is. To be honest, I haven’t had the heart to visit there in years.”

  “I didn’t realize,” she whispered.

  “How could you?”

  “And the rumors that the castle is haunted? Did you invent those, too?”

  He smiled grimly. “It was a method to discourage the morbid minded. Curses, ghosts rising from the crypt to take revenge. To a certain extent it has worked. At least, I haven’t been tempted to set foot in the place again. I’ve begun to write a story about its history but can never bring myself to finish it.” He shook his head. “How did we get on this subject, Lily?”